This is a WaPo article about QAnon, but this stuff is happening all over the conspiracist right.
With Trump gone, QAnon groups focus fury on attacking coronavirus vaccines
QAnon is flourishing on Telegram chat groups even after purges on Facebook, Twitter and others
Within the alternative universe of the “Q NEWS OFFICIAL TV” group on Telegram, coronavirus vaccines aren’t saving lives and bending the pandemic toward its eventual end. Rather, they are bioweapons concocted by an evil cabal of corrupt government officials and drug companies.
Their goal? Depopulation. Social control. Altering the very genetic structure of our species.
Such unhinged conspiracy theories once ran rampant on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But months of purging accounts that trafficked heavily in the baseless QAnon ideology — especially after it helped fuel the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol — have reduced those voices on leading social media sites.
Now adherents of QAnon, an extremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat, can be found in the less-visible but still-virulent world of encrypted chat app groups on Telegram and elsewhere. These largely unmoderated online spaces have become cauldrons of ludicrous claims about the pandemic and breeding grounds for an increasingly intense alliance between QAnon and covid denialism.
Videos with names such as “Murder By ‘Vaccine’ — The Evidence Mounts!” and “Doctors and Nurses Giving the coronavirus vaccine Will Be Tried as War Criminals” have been viewed tens of thousands of times after being linked on QAnon-themed channels, including “Q NEWS OFFICIAL TV,” which has more than 50,000 members. Other QAnon groups on Telegram have more than 200,000 members — and endless streams of misinformation about the pandemic.
“Nothing so far has been able sink QAnon, whether it be massive purges by social media companies or the failure of its so-called plan to manifest,” said Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online extremism. “Now, as energy around its election-related conspiracy theories loses momentum, the Q movement has doubled its focus on themes like covid-19 denialism and vaccine skepticism.” ...
A report published Thursday by the Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks misinformation and extremism online, warned that crackdowns on mainstream sites may backfire by fueling vaccine resistance and making it harder for researchers to monitor. The report also said several potent online conspiracies are showing signs of merging into a broader populist, anti-government movement distrustful of outsiders and traditional sources of authority. ... “This creates a ready audience for politically fueled lies and will undermine the vaccine rollout,” said Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the research group. “This could cost thousands and thousands of lives.” ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/11/with-trump-gone-qanon-groups-focus-fury-attacking-covid-vaccines/
As you can see, just offering facts is worse than a waste of time. Are there ways his family could lessen (eliminate!) his exposure to the toxic gasses he's seeking out on line and increase his exposure to the real world and real-world information?
There are on-line groups where those who love them share their problems and successes, like Reddit's Qanon Casualties. One family got a kid a new car or some such thing and that really changed how he spent his after-school time; so use healthy interests to distract him? A husband secretly blocked some of his wife's sites and took her out more. Someone who got herself out developed a new practice of looking everything up to verify information, so encourage the idea in the family of "when you hear it you check it out?" Leave interesting magazines around, read them yourselves and chat about interesting, noncontroversial events, like how volcano eruptions are teaching us how gerbils think? Failing professional counseling, each successful move in that direction might add up to real intervention.
Btw, since January 6 militant domestic terror groups are newly focused on recruiting young men hooked by conspiracy theories, to persuade them to join them to combat the "evil." The targeted conspiracists have been driven to concentrate on Telegram and on closed sites, now that most social media have shut thousands of their old gathering places down, and the recruiters go there too. And of course political manipulators are stalking them also.
Good luck.
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